We’d last seen Jeffrey at an open house down the way on Sunday. We’d poked through the place. Three units. Top unit is vacant and has been rehabbed. We introduced ourselves to a new tenant/neighbor who moved in less than a month ago into the middle unit. Tenant/neighbor works at Linden Labs and can walk to work. His unit is in a more original state than the vacant upper unit. We didn’t see the bottom unit.

Since I started with StumbleUpon umpty ump (March 17, 2004) years ago, I’ve rated 1777 sites and, must admit, sometimes spend months without checking in. These days I not only put links on my blog but also put links on Tumblr and links on del.icio.us and, sometimes, on StumbleUpon.

For jeffkos ’cause we all know how much he likes ramen and because I’m tinkering with the bookmarks I recently moved to http://del.icio.us/towse and I happen to be poking around in foodie links and came across Matt Fischer’s (moved since I first found it while he was at umr.edu) Official Ramen Homepage which eventually led me to YouTube (as all things do) and ’cause kos said the bikini wax post “did nothing to help my day along. Not a thing.” Here’s something to help your day along, Jeff. The things I will do for my funs.

Just six and a half minutes of your time. (You could be watching an egg hardboil.) This is better. Trust me.

On Your Feet by January W. Payne (yes, no kidding, payne) Washington Post Staff Writer. Subtitled: How do shoes affect your feet? Is there a good way to walk in heels? Want to know about Morton’s neuroma? How about hammertoe and pump bumps?

A quick snippet from the middle:

One of trendiest shoes this season is YSL’s platform “Tribute” — with a tottering 5 1/2 -inch heel. Often painstakingly selected to complete outfits, shoes like these put stress not just on feet, but on ankles, knees and backs, contributing to the approximately $3.5 billion spent annually in the United States for women’s foot surgeries, which cause them to lose 15 million work days yearly.

Ouch.

(mentioned in the comments tail of the previously mentioned aetiology post)

Tara C. Smith, an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, University of Iowa, creates a post with serious ewww factor.

Here’s the background: A woman with untreated Type 1 diabetes (making her susceptible to infections) gets a bikini wax. … She comes down with a fever, swelling and pain where the bikini wax works its magic, waited another week to find a doctor. … and …

She presented to the ER with not only “grossly swollen” external genitalia, and pain so extreme that she had to be put under general anesthetic just so her physician could perform a gynecologic exam. She was so swollen that, according to the legend to Figure 1 (which you can find online, as the article is freely available), “she was unable to pass urine, and the vaginal space was obliterated by edema.”

Ouch.

The patient also had a rash over her chest and neck. From these clinical signs and the subsequent isolation of S. pyogenes from a urine culture and sample of the vaginal discharge, she was diagnosed with streptococcal cellulitis and toxic shock syndrome, and was also found to have an active herpes simplex virus type 1 infection.

[...]

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ….

[via pharyngula. Thanks for the intro to Dr. Smith and aetiology, a blog that discusses “causes, origins, evolution, and implications of disease and other phenomena.”]

Two significant collections of previously classified historical documents are now available in the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room.

The first collection, widely known as the “Family Jewels,” consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter.

The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of in-depth analysis and research from 1953 to 1973. The CAESAR and POLO papers studied Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, respectively, and the ESAU papers were developed by analysts to inform CIA assessments on Sino-Soviet relations.

According to ABC NewsThe recruitment of mafia men to plan the assassination of Fidel Castro, the wiretapping and surveillance of journalists who reported on classified material, and the two-year confinement in the United States of a KGB defector — those are just a few of the past CIA activities revealed in documents released Tuesday. [...]

Update:A more in-depth look at some of the “activities inconsistent with the Agency’s charter” from The Seattle PI.